As cellular communication services have become increasingly available and common, traditional methods of receiving payment for cellular services have been found lacking. Commonly, services are rendered to a customer and at the end of a set period, a bill is sent to the customer for the services rendered during that period. This essentially amounts to extending credit to the customer. For traditional, residential telephone customers, service can easily be terminated for non-payment of such bills because the offender is easily identified and is in a fixed location. Cellular communication customers, however, have been able to evade payment of such bills by seeking service from a new provider when prior service has been terminated. The cycle can continue in this fashion, with each successive provider losing money to such customers.
Prepayment for cellular services is being widely embraced as a solution to this problem. Using this system, a customer provides money to a service provider in advance of the rendering of communication services. Service charges are then deducted from the customer's balance until the prepayment is depleted. Unlike many services, though, the costs of telephone communication are often a complex conglomeration of fees based on a wide array of factors, such as connection charges, surcharges, taxes, and other charges. Furthermore, many of these factors can vary widely, even during a single connection, based on conditions such as the time of day, the locations of the calling parties, volume discounts, and other variables. For example, a cellular communication device may move from one calling area to another resulting in a substantial change in the rate. Such factors make determining the quantity of service available for a fixed, prepaid amount a complex endeavor.
One solution currently in use is to determine, on a minute-by-minute basis, the accumulated service charge and compare this amount to the amount of prepayment as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,722,067, incorporated herein by reference. This technique, however, requires a considerable amount of processing support for the repeated calculations, because once each minute, the cost of the previous minute must be calculated, deducted from the available balance. Furthermore, the depletion of the balance must be monitored in order to notify the caller when the call will be terminated. A method for reducing the processing necessary to meter service would greatly reduce the costs associated with providing communication services to prepaid callers.